by David Drake
“That is Anti-Thule,” agreed the ancestor. “That is our destiny.”
He laughed. He was still laughing when he and Varus stepped into the windswept ruins of Anti-Thule. The sun was low on the horizon, and the cold was like nothing Varus had ever felt.
* * *
HEDIA WAS ADRIFT IN TIME. She had no physical being; there was no physical being. There was no duration. There was only a present that encompassed all past and all future.
Many people thought of me as only a body, she thought. A very supple, willing body. The humor of the situation would have made her smile if she had had physical presence.
Hedia’s whole life was before her in minutest detail. She viewed it as though she were picking up each grain of sand on a beach, examining it, and going on to the next.
There were no surprises. It was because Hedia was self-aware that she had made so few concessions to society and its rules. Someone who saw herself and her world less clearly would have tried harder to fit in … and would have failed.
Hedia had made mistakes—thousands of mistakes—over the years. Fewer as she gained knowledge and experience, but—she would have smiled again—much worse ones as time went on also.
Hedia didn’t regret even the bad ones, the mistakes that could have killed her. She had learned from each one. If I hadn’t done that, I would have done something worse later. I survived, and another time I might not have been so lucky.
When she was fourteen, she had found herself alone with a colleague of her father—alone in the sense that the score of others present were slaves who couldn’t and wouldn’t give evidence against a senator. Most of them had been his slaves besides, though that didn’t matter.
Her mistake had been in trying to fight. The senator had beaten her unconscious—and might well have killed her—and then had his way. Hedia had no virtue to lose even at fourteen.
A month later the senator had visited again in response to a note saying that Hedia couldn’t forget him and that her body was raging for his touch. She thought he might have too much sense than to believe her, but men are arrogant and the senator was rather more so than most.
Hedia had smiled as she knelt before him and lifted the hem of his tunic. He screamed a moment later as she jumped to her feet. She spat his member onto the mosaic floor and slipped from the room while her outside escort waited grinning in the doorway to deal with any of the senator’s servants who might try to follow.
The victim himself wasn’t running after anyone.
Fighting the first time had been a mistake, but Hedia had learned from it.
There was other existence in Eternity: Hedia felt glowing, pulsing hunger.
She examined the hunger as she did her life, facet by identical facet. At the core of it she found the tiny savage mind of a spider. She remembered the brush of a web across her shoulders as she plunged from the Waking World into this.
Its life is nothing but hunger, she mused.
“ARE YOU SO VERY DIFFERENT, HEDIA?” said a presence in this limbo. Like the spider, like Hedia, the presence was but had no separate being.
Hedia tried to examine the presence as she had the spider’s hunger. Instead of separate instants like grains of sand, this was Eternal and all encompassing—drops of water in an ocean, infinitely mixing and changing.
“Who are you?” Hedia said/thought. “What are you?”
“WE ARE ETERNAL,” said the presence. “WE ARE CONNECTIONS. WE ARE ALL THE CONNECTIONS BUT ONE, AND WE CHOSE TO REMOVE OURSELVES FROM THE COSMOS BEFORE WE BECAME THAT CONNECTION ALSO AND THE COSMOS ENDED.”
There was no duration. All time was one time. Hedia was and the spider was and the Eternals were.
“You were trapped here?” Hedia said. As I am, she thought, but thought was all existence in Eternity.
“WE ARE NOT TRAPPED,” the Eternals said. “WE HAVE WITHDRAWN OURSELVES FROM THE COSMOS SO THAT WE WILL NOT DESTROY THE COSMOS. WE CANNOT LEAVE THIS EXISTENCE AND NO ONE CAN JOIN US HERE.”
The laughter was cool and, like everything else in this limbo, all encompassing.
“YOU HAVE JOINED US,” the Eternals said, “AND YOU HAVE BROUGHT A SPIDER.”
“There must be a way out,” said Hedia. She was not afraid—there could be no fear or other emotion here—but she had grown up as a woman in a world of powerful men. She always looked for the way out, the way around. There had always been a way out.
“WE CREATED A PLACE WHICH WE COULD NOT LEAVE, HEDIA,” the Eternals said. “IF YOUR MIND SEES A CONNECTION THAT WE COULD NOT, YOU WILL BE ABLE TO LEAVE.”
The cool laughter filled Hedia’s existence. Eternally.
CHAPTER XV
Hedia existed.
None of the details—brightness, a crackle like lightning dancing along a water pipe, the ground pitching—mattered compared to the fact that she had a physical body and she controlled it.
She stood on a flagstone plaza facing scores of Tyla with headdresses, each decorated with a pair of long black feathers. In the center, on the lowest step of a round temple, was the white-furred Godspeaker. He held up in both hands a soapstone tablet. All that was familiar to Hedia from the scenes the Spring of True Answers had showed her.
Flanking the Godspeaker but standing just beyond the temple steps were two humans: an Indian clad in cotton and a squat, powerful man in a wool tunic with his hair bound with a fillet. The latter looked like an Italian countryman, but he had the presence of someone used to being obeyed.
The streets beyond the temple were packed with watching Tyla, some of them carrying their offspring in pouches that were part of their belly fur. Their faces were taut with fear; that was obvious even on features so unhuman.
In the distance, beyond the last of the flimsy houses, the air steamed. A fish the size of a warship lifted itself on its fins and flopped forward. One of its barbels had curled about a Tylon; in the instant Hedia watched, the barbel swung its victim into the flat mouth. In the low sun, the smooth skin of the fish gleamed like pus.
What am I doing here? Why am I anywhere?
Hedia wore the clothing in which she had run into the jungle. No one, neither the Tyla nor even the two other humans, seemed to notice her. They were looking at—
There was a flash so bright that the thunder accompanying it went unheard.
The Eternals hung in the air above the plaza. They were not made of light; rather, they were a complete absence of color or density. They filled the sky or replaced it, and they had no shape or limit.
The Godspeaker threw up his hands and shouted, putting the soapstone tablet between him and the presence. A prismatic cone enveloped him. The tablet dropped and bounced when the hands holding it vanished in drifting dust motes like the rest of the Tylon.
The human wizards dodged away from the destruction. The Tyla priests either fell to their knees or tried to flee, though the packed spectators blocked them.
The rainbow light sprang from the crater, bathing the swelling ulcer. Stones and white-hot iron erupted like balls of lava from Vesuvius to fall as burning hail. Fires burst out all over the community. Tyla screamed even louder.
A blob of iron the size of a fist struck in front of Hedia and splashed over the cobblestones; a tiny fleck touched the back of her wrist like a hot needle. She would have a blister the size of her thumbnail tomorrow—if she was alive, if there was a tomorrow.
Water that had seeped to fill the bowl now flashed into steam, popping and sparkling. It mounted in a mile-high column before spreading like a thunderhead. Snow and swirling ice crystals drifted back to earth.
As suddenly as they had appeared, the Eternals vanished with a crash. It knocked Hedia to the ground. Houses lifted off their foundations and slammed back awry.
Moments later an icy wind struck the community from all directions, tearing apart the dwellings and throwing down those Tyla who were still on their feet. Hedia had planted her hands to lift herself; she flattened till the initial blast spent itself. Shreds of paper house
s lifted in circles above the plaza where the winds had met.
The Temple of the Moon toppled forward, breaking apart even before it hit the ground. It had probably been falling since the shock of the Eternals’ departure, but its weight had made the process ponderously slow compared to the rush of the wind. It covered the place where the Godspeaker had stood.
The blocks tumbled outward, one of them landing on the soapstone tablet and breaking it in half. The outer portion flipped into the air. Before it could hit the ground again, the Indian wizard caught it. He ran past Hedia in a crouch, the tablet clutched to his chest and his face set in a rictus.
She turned her head and saw a rosy disk like the one that she had entered at Polymartium. She didn’t know what was on the other side this time, but it probably wasn’t Anti-Thule. That was good enough.
Hedia scuttled half the distance on all fours before she got her feet properly under her. As she dived toward the glow she looked back. The remaining human wizard snatched something from the cobblestones: the pointed ear clipped off when the rush of fire destroyed the rest of the Godspeaker.
Then Hedia was through the portal.
* * *
CORYLUS PEERED THROUGH THE SPARSE foliage of a myrtle bush toward the entrance of the cave a hundred feet away. The dragons chained there were curled on the barren ground.
“They’re breathing!” said Bion, crouching beside him. The bush wasn’t big enough to hide two men, but the dragons seemed as somnolent as the cliff face. “They’re not dead!”
And why in the name of Hercules would you think they might be dead? Corylus thought. Though clearly the sailor must have extremely sharp eyes to detect the rise and fall of the beasts’ chests, if that was what he had done.
Aura stepped out around them without even pretending to try to conceal herself. “Publius Corylus, I promised to bring you to the Cave of Zagreus. Have I carried out my promise?”
Well, I won’t know that until I enter the cave, Corylus thought. But that was thinking as a student of logic, and right now he needed to think like a Batavian Scout.
“Yes,” he said. “Thank you, Aura. You’ve done as you promised and … well, you can do whatever you please now. I have no claim on you.”
“I have nothing to do, nowhere to go,” the sprite said. Her expression was calm, her voice lilting but emotionless. “If you permit, I will stay with you until you leave or are killed.”
Corylus kept his face still, but there was a moment’s hesitation before he said, “Yes, you’re welcome to stay with us.”
She was just viewing the situation clearly, after all. The way a Scout would, though another Scout might not have blurted his analysis so baldly. Everybody knows what the risks are, but we don’t ordinarily dwell on them aloud.
Because the dragons were curled Corylus couldn’t be sure how long they were, but probably about twenty feet. Their bodies were covered with blue scales, iridescent for the most part but marked with bands of duller gray-blue at intervals.
Their wings, four each, were sheets of ridged transparency like those of dragonflies, sticking out at right angles to their bodies from sockets on their shoulders. The creatures were much larger than any bird Corylus could imagine. Though slender as otters, they must weigh at least a thousand pounds each: as much as cows.
Bion stood, lacing his fingers behind his back and stretching his powerful shoulder muscles. “Well, what do we do now, Captain?” he said.
Corylus looked at the sailor. He didn’t snarl, because that would have been just as pointless as the stupid, pointless question. If I knew what to do, I wouldn’t be standing here like a dock piling!
“Aura?” Corylus said, letting amusement wash over his frustration. He spoke quietly, but he didn’t whisper. “Do you know why the dragons are sleeping?”
Aura shrugged. “They were awake when Zetes and I saw them before,” she said. “They walked to the end of their chains and then walked back. You see how the ground is worn.”
Corylus started to ask, “The passage to the Waking World is through the cave?” but he swallowed the words. Aura had said so in the past; he didn’t need to hear it again. He was only looking for a way to delay what he knew had to be done.
“All right,” he said. “Bion and Aura, I won’t need your help further.”
There’s no help they can give.
“I’m going to go between the dragons and into the cave. If you want to follow after I’ve gotten through, you’re welcome to do so, but wait until I’m clear.”
Bion blinked and said, “What if they wake up?”
He may have been a very good helmsman, Corylus thought, but he must have been a trial to his captains. I’ve never known a man with such a genius for uncomfortable questions that can’t be answered.
“I’ll deal with the situation as it arises,” said Corylus, attempting—rather successfully, he thought—a lofty unconcern. He wondered how often his father had given a similar answer to similar questions.
And he came home wealthy and with a knighthood, Corylus thought. And smiled and thought, But most of the men who’d enlisted with him left their bones on the frontiers.
Corylus twitched his dagger in its sheath—needlessly; the orichalc didn’t bind—and shrugged his shoulders. Holding his staff at the balance in his right hand, he walked toward the cave and its guardians.
The dragons didn’t move, though as Corylus approached he thought he heard a burring sound like that from the interior of a beehive. The creatures had six legs, short compared to the size of their bodies but still as long as a man’s. Rather than being retracted, the claws on the three-toed feet were drawn upwards to keep them from being worn blunt when they weren’t needed to rend prey.
Corylus reached the dragons, holding his breath. He didn’t think breathing was going to awaken them if the sound of his sandals didn’t, but it was something to do.
He smiled and let out his breath softly. He had every right to be frightened; but it wouldn’t do any good, so he wouldn’t give in to it.
The dragons were curled three feet apart, plenty of room to walk between. To Corylus’ surprise, their bodies radiated warmth. Their heads were sharply triangular, more like that of a praying mantis than a snake. The silvery links of the chains attached to the neck collars rang in faint counterpoint to the burring from their torsos.
Corylus walked past the dragons and to the cave mouth. They could still turn and follow him in to the length of their chains, but the pressure that had been squeezing his chest released him.
He heard a jingle and looked over his shoulder, missing a step. The dragons had gotten up and were stretching. One of them turned its head to look at him, but they seemed no more interested than a pair of doves watching from the roof of their cote.
Nobody is coming by that way to rescue me. Corylus allowed the thought to bubble out as laughter. Nothing had changed, after all.
The cave was circular in cross section, like a section of water pipe. There were no chisel gouges or marks from casting forms.
Something hung in the air before Corylus, shimmering without solidity. He paused, frowning, then walked forward. Perhaps it was what he had come to find.
It was a circular mirror, hovering at the height of Corylus’ face. He saw himself in it, perfect in reduced detail.
There was a flash. Corylus could not move. He was looking toward the entrance of the cave. The huge figure of Rupa walked toward him.
“I have been waiting for you, Publius Corylus,” she said, and reached out. There was no contact, but his viewpoint moved toward the entrance. “Soon your lover will arrive. In return for your release she will give me the Godspeaker’s ear and I will finally be able to take my vengeance on the West. If she does not—”
Corylus was shifted to look into Rupa’s magnified face. She’s holding me in her hand.
“—then you will spend eternity in this mirror.”
* * *
VARUS AND THE NAKED OLD MAN stepped into windswept ru
ins and bitter cold. It was bright though the sun was low on the horizon, but the sky was the pale white of watered milk. The sea was behind them, and in all other directions ice glittered on the horizon.
The ancestor looked about. He didn’t seem to feel the cold.
Govinda must have sent us back not too long after the time I fled, he said. The houses had been thrown down, but the wind hadn’t started to pull the sides off the frames.
Varus heard the ancestor speaking Greek. He had a pronounced Ionic accent quite different from the Athenian dialect spoken by orators, but the “words” rang in Varus’ mind rather than coming through his ears anyway. The old man had a material body here in Anti-Thule: his feet crunched on the gravel of the shore.
They stood at the edge of the community in the center of the green enclave that Varus had seen in visions, but the houses were bare sticks to which the paper walls and roofs hung in shreds. The few freestanding monuments had toppled, and stone foundations were gapped and crooked.
“Did the meteor knock everything down when it brought the Blight?” Varus asked.
He shivered despite his tunic and the sandals that kept his soles off the cold ground, but he didn’t expect to have another opportunity to learn about Anti-Thule. Varus might not survive more than an eyeblink after he returned to Govinda’s palace—the king certainly didn’t wish him well—but that was no reason not to gain as much knowledge as he could in the time remaining.
No, said the ancestor. When the Godspeaker brought me to help him, the houses had been repaired. It was a ball of iron, not a rock, and sparks from it started fires before they cooled. I could still smell the sour smoke, but the houses had been rebuilt.
The ancestor started into the ruined city, going toward where the Temple of the Moon had stood in the visions beneath Govinda’s sanctum. Varus paused, then bent and picked up the object that had caught his eye.
It was a long bone, probably a thigh. If Varus had found it on a street in Carce, he would have guessed it was a goat’s. Here it must have been from a Tylon. One end had been gnawed off.
I don’t know what happened to the Tyla, the ancestor said; he too had paused and was looking back. Without the Godspeaker there was nothing to stop the cold. I suppose the cold killed them, that and the crops dying.